Strangled Prose Read online

  At last the lieutenant cleared his throat. “And you went into the Twiller house to—ah, test the hypothesis of the color scheme in the boudoir?”

  “It wasn’t mauve or pink; it was kind of a pearl white.”

  “A grave disappointment, I’m sure. While you were there, did you happen to hear anything or see anyone?”

  She giggled. “We heard someone come in the front door. I could have died right then and there, but Inez dragged me into a closet and we scrunched down behind a mink coat. I just sat there and stroked it. It was absolutely heavenly.”

  Lieutenant Rosen looked less than angelic, but he managed a smile. “Do you know who came in downstairs?”

  “It was Azalea herself. We heard her talking to that yucky little dog as if he were a baby; it was creepy—to the max. We held our breath for ever and ever, hoping she would leave so that we could get out of there. Just as we had decided to open the bedroom door to see what she was doing, someone else came in. We jumped back into the boudoir and crouched behind the bed. Then we heard voices on the patio, so we slipped down the stairs and ran out the front door.”

  My stomach flopped like a wrasse on the grass. Caron and Inez had been giggling upstairs—while Mildred was being strangled on the patio. The two could have been found alongside her, with color-coordinated scarves … and protruding black tongues.

  I found my voice and said, “Why didn’t you tell anyone, Caron? You knew that Mildred was killed on the patio below the bedroom window! Weren’t you worried that the murderer might have seen you and—”

  “Mother, it wasn’t the murderer. It was Douglas Twiller.” Slowly and patiently, as if I needed precise articulation in order to follow her logic.

  “Douglas Twiller?” My mouth fell open. “Are you sure? I thought you heard voices but didn’t see anyone?”

  Caron shrugged. “Inez peeked out the window.”

  “But it couldn’t have been Douglas,” I said slowly, frowning across Caron at Lieutenant Rosen. “He was in my office until three-thirty, then on the other side of the campus with his newest girlfriend. How did he get home and back without being seen?”

  He had the courtesy to look equally mystified. “I don’t know. There is another little problem, too. If he killed his wife, then who…?”

  “Oh, he didn’t strangle his wife,” Caron chimed in blithely. “He just brought her a tea tray and left. Inez couldn’t hear what they said, but she didn’t think either of them looked mad. He was kissing her good-bye when we left and saying something about seeing her later, after the reception was over.”

  We both gaped at her. I said, “I thought Inez took a quick peek and then you two ran down the stairs and left? Were you listening to the conversation as well?”

  “I told you we couldn’t hear anything, Mother.” Indignation coated her voice like an oil slick. “Is that all? I have a midterm paper due Friday, and I’d like to go by the library and pick up a book. Rhonda probably thinks I’m on the bus to Alcatraz by now; I’d like to let her know that I haven’t been electrocuted for a simple little prank.”

  Lieutenant Rosen went over to a vending machine and checked the coin return, carefully avoiding my beady stare. “Just one more thing, Miss Malloy. Did you or Miss Brandon happen to notice a medallion?”

  “We saw it in a velvet-lined box on the dresser. I thought it was dumb, but Inez gurgled about it forever. It was silver, with a curly rose on it. Big deal.”

  “Did you—ah, borrow it?” he said carefully, no doubt mentally reaching for his handcuffs. Petite size.

  “I am not a thief!” Caron gave me a startled look. “You know I wouldn’t steal anything.”

  I sighed. “Except for the book on my desk?”

  “Books don’t count. Besides, it was yours, Mother. You didn’t accuse me of being a thief when I borrowed your hot rollers.”

  The terminology had come to mind, since they hadn’t reappeared in my bedroom for over a week. Nor had my eye shadow. It still hadn’t turned up, for that matter.

  Lieutenant Rosen interrupted what might have digressed into a family argument, saying, “No one has accused you of being a thief, Miss Malloy. Sometimes a sudden impulse overpowers common sense, that’s all. Could Miss Brandon have pocketed the medallion?”

  “If she did, I didn’t see her do it. What’s the big deal anyway? She would have replaced it the next time we were there,” Caron muttered, her eyes intent on her sneakers.

  “The next time you broke into the house?” I inserted acidly. Fourteen years with the child, and I still found her inscrutable.

  “We didn’t break anything. We opened the front door and walked in, Mother. If people can’t bother to lock their doors, they should accept the fact that other people will come in. It’s practically an invitation.”

  “Lock her up,” I told the lieutenant. “There must be some charge that will keep her occupied until college. She can learn the art of basketry in the interim, or how to make license plates.”

  “Mother!” The lower lip almost bumped the far wall.

  “It was only a thought,” I snapped. I sent Caron home with an obliging police officer and told her to wait for me. As she slunk out, I heard a muttered threat about her academic record being jeopardized by my insensitivity. It did not merit a response. When she was gone, I said, “Where’s the other juvenile delinquent?”

  He left for a minute and returned with a worried look. “They couldn’t find her. I don’t understand any of this, but I think Miss Brandon’s commentary would be valuable.”

  “It doesn’t make any sense. If Douglas strangled Mildred, then who strangled him? I can’t believe some enraged romance reader would do the dirty deed, but nobody had any motive. You and I are the only ones who know that he wrote those awful books, including Professor of Passion.”

  “So we are.” He put a coin in the machine, pushed a button, and opened a plastic door in the middle of the machine. Coke rained on his hand. He stared at it. “Shit.”

  I gulped back a semi-hysterical giggle. When he finished wiping his hand on his handkerchief, I said, “Have you checked everyone else’s alibis for this afternoon?”

  “Jorgeson couldn’t find Britton Blake, but he said Maggie Holland was clearing out her desk in Farber Hall. Ms. Holland had nothing much to say about Twiller’s death. Very uninterested, Jorgeson said. But, on the other hand, Twiller wasn’t popular with either of them.” He made a pretense of reading the instructions on the machine. “Where were you, by the way?”

  “Are you asking me for an alibi?” My voice swooped over the pronouns.

  “I’m asking you where you were, Mrs. Malloy. Nothing more than that. I’m supposed to ask questions. In fact, I get paid to ask questions.”

  “Do you think I strangled Mildred and then went after Douglas when I realized my mistake? Do I honestly look like the sort of person who would—who would strangle someone over a stupid book?”

  “As you pointed out, you and I are the only ones who know the true identity of Azalea Twilight. No one else had any reason to strangle Twiller.”

  “How can you accept my hospitality and then accuse me of murder?” I said hotly as I stood up and started for the door. “You can just solve this yourself, Sherlock. Get your bologna at the grocery store from now on. I don’t know who killed the Twillers, and furthermore, I don’t care!”

  I stomped out of the police station and down the street, the very picture of justifiable outrage. I was at least a mile from the apartment, but I didn’t care. The nerve of the man to ask me for an alibi! Oh, he thought he had cause—but the idea was absurd. I slowed down as I swung around the corner and out of sight of the police station. Why would anyone kill Douglas Twiller, except for me? There had to be another motive beyond the libelous material in the book. Which meant I was overlooking someone.

  That didn’t explain how Douglas had made it home and back without being seen, nor did it explain why he had given Maggie an advance copy of the book—unless he was, as Lieu
tenant Rosen theorized, trying to manipulate the scene. Douglas hadn’t denied it; he had merely refused to elaborate. Perhaps he should have.

  I turned on Thurber Street and went to the Book Depot. Locking the door behind me, I wandered between the display shelves to the office. There I found a piece of paper, listed all those involved, drew a few meaningless arrows, and threw the paper in the wastebasket. In novels, the detective is adept at producing a timetable that proves the butler wasn’t really in the solarium at half past five. In reality, I had no idea where anyone was at the pertinent times.

  That wasn’t true, I decided as I fished the paper out again and smoothed it down. Maggie Holland hadn’t been at her lawyer’s office when Mildred was strangled—and she hadn’t been cleaning out her desk when Douglas was murdered. I was at Farber Hall at the time; the building was vacant of anything more substantial than memories. Jorgeson had erred, or the lieutenant had lied to me. The latter seemed more than plausible.

  Britton could be on a bus to Kalamazoo, for all I knew. With Inez Brandon, the ringleader and petty thief.

  “Shit,” I said, echoing an earlier sentiment.

  I threw the paper away again, then looked around the office at the piles of clutter, the stacks of unrecorded invoices, the wealth of correspondence from my distributors. I had neglected my store for several days. It seemed like time to retire from the Nancy Drew role and leave the mess in Peter Rosen’s lap.

  I switched off the light and locked the door, self-discipline having never been one of my strengths. When I arrived at the apartment, I opened Caron’s door. She was sprawled across the bed, the telephone receiver embedded in her ear.

  Glowering, she said, “What?”

  “You read Professor of Passion. Was it the copy that was on my desk Sunday afternoon?”

  She covered the mouth of the receiver. “I promised I wouldn’t read it, Mother, and I didn’t.”

  My little girl scout sounded as if she were facing a tribunal. She seemed to have forgotten our conversation at the kitchen table in the not-too-distant past. Very convenient lapse.

  “Then how did you know what was in it?” I countered politely.

  “Inez was the one who borrowed it to read. She’s only lived in Farberville two or three years; she didn’t even catch Dad’s name in the plot. She told me every bit of it afterward.”

  “Where is the copy now?”

  “She offered to give it to me after she had finished it, but I didn’t want it. We sort of had an argument, and I ended up telling her that Azalea Twilight wrote garbage and that I had thrown my collection away. She was totally offended. Okay, Mother?”

  “Are you talking to Inez now?”

  “No, Mother, I was talking to Rhonda, but she’s probably hung up by now. Or fallen asleep.”

  “You’ll have to risk it,” I said. “When you were seen near the Twillers’ house, you were staring at something in Inez’s hand. If it was the medallion, you’d best tell me.”

  “It wasn’t the medallion, Mother! For that matter, I was too terrified to look at anything, including Inez Brandon’s stupid hand. Is that all?”

  “Do you have any idea where Inez is?”

  “No, and I don’t care. She’s such an infant that she gets her thrills from reading erotica. It’s too immature for words.”

  I shut the door and went back to the living room, feeling mildly successful. I now knew what had happened to the advance copy. I knew, or hoped I did, the extent of Caron’s involvement. She hadn’t been an accessory to theft, unless she was lying. She would be in good company if she had. I knew that Maggie had lied, Douglas had lied, and Britton had lied. Mildred Twiller had lived a lie. I had—well, evaded the truth upon occasion, but always with good reason.

  It seemed important to locate the medallion. I called Inez’s house, but her mother had not seen her since eight that morning and was startled to hear that Inez was not with Caron. It was not the moment to discuss the investigation, or what was separating the girls. We exchanged pleasantries and hung up.

  The whole thing had turned into a full-fledged muddle, I decided morosely as I replaced the receiver. Caron and Inez had seen Douglas at his house, at the time he couldn’t have been there. He had been kissing his wife on the patio and probably giving her some sort of explanation about the book. Although he had assured me that I would also hear an explanation, he had known that Mildred would be unavailable—in the most permanent way—when the time came. But I didn’t believe he had strangled her. There was only one murderer creeping around Farberville. But who?

  One pseudo-alibi needed to be exploded. I went down the stairs and knocked on Maggie’s door.

  “Hello,” I said when she appeared. I pushed past her without giving her a chance to remodel my face with the door. “Did you hear that Douglas Twiller was murdered?”

  Maggie’s face remained blank. “Some cop came by Farber Hall to tell me all about it.”

  “I was there, but I didn’t see you.”

  “Well, I didn’t see you. Does that mean that one of us strangled Douglas Twiller?”

  “We’ll return to that in a minute, Maggie. First, we’re going to discuss Sunday afternoon after the reception. You did not go to your lawyer’s office; he was playing golf. Where were you?”

  The politically correct posture collapsed. Her shoulders sagged, and her face took on a more human expression. “I did call, but his answering service said they’d have to beep him at the golf course. When I got tired of waiting, I left to warn my lover, a woman in the foreign-language department. We discussed our options the rest of the afternoon. My friend is hoping that she’ll be able to stay at Farber, if she can keep her name out of it. None of this is her fault; I’ve been trying to protect her.”

  “She’s in the foreign-language department?” I repeated, bewildered. I suppose I had presumed that Maggie’s friend was the motor-mouthed Sheila Belinski.

  “That’s right. Do you want her name so that you can lead a witch hunt?” Her cheeks inflated as if she were a blowfish.

  “No, Maggie,” I said gently. “You said that you were there all afternoon. Did you stay there that evening, too?”

  “I decided to find Britton Blake, since he was in the same mess that I was in. I thought we might form an alliance, although it wouldn’t have done any good in the long run. Farber College does not allow immoral instructors to teach anything to the innocents—not even poetry. Tuition is too high to risk offending some narrow-minded parent.”

  “Did you find Britton?”

  “He was reeling up Thurber with a troglodyte in white cowboy boots. I could see that we weren’t going to engage in meaningful dialogue, since they were cross-eyed and singing at the top of their lungs. I don’t think he recognized me.”

  I found that oddly warming. Britton hadn’t been in any condition to strangle Mildred; he couldn’t have tied a knot. I checked him off and moved on to the next suspect.

  “You weren’t at Farber Hall earlier this afternoon,” I said. I stopped to think for a minute, then took a chance. “You were with your lover. You must have arrived at Farber Hall after I left and pretended to have been there all afternoon, in order to avoid any names.”

  “We were saying good-bye,” she admitted in a low voice. “I wasn’t strangling Douglas Twiller. I yell and scowl a lot, but I don’t murder people, Claire.”

  “I am sorry, Maggie. Your name was dragged through the mud, but not for any good reason. Lieutenant Rosen thinks Douglas was behind the scene from the beginning, that the libel was planned in order to provoke the situation. To give several of us a motive for poor Mildred’s death.”

  She deserved to hear the truth, so I told her about the schizophrenic nature of Azalea Twilight. She wasn’t noticeably stunned.

  “I suspected as much, but since Twiller had rank, I saw no reason to mention it. So he wrote the trash and she took the credit…” Maggie shook her head. “Did he strangle her because she wanted to escape the chauvinistic shackles?�
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  “No,” I sighed. “I won’t go into it, but I don’t think he did. If nothing else, he wasn’t vicious and cold-blooded. He might have devised the whole scheme, but he must have chickened out at the last moment. Someone else finished the scene for him. I wish he had strangled poor Mildred; it would have been tidier.”

  “Then who did?”

  I made a face worthy of Caron’s better efforts. “I haven’t any idea. Not you, not me, not Britton—who was incapable of knotting his shoelaces. No one else has a motive, unless Stephanie and Derek did it out of an obscure respect for literature.”

  “Who?” Maggie asked with a nervous gesture, no doubt thinking the mental strain had finally pickled my brain.

  “Never mind.” I murmured a good-bye and went upstairs to stare out the window at the dark campus across the street. Douglas had manipulated us; that much I accepted. Yet there was still an uncomfortable sense of manipulation by an invisible hand, as though we were puppets. Acts one and two had been played; the third and final act remained. And Douglas was no longer the puppet master.

  At last I went to my bedroom and undressed. A mug filled with foul-looking coffee was on the table; I picked it up to study the face of the Professor himself, dear Derek. The moisture from the cup had blurred his features, and his smile was more soggy than arrogant. Stephanie still desired him, however. She glittered at him with an adoration that could not be defrayed by condensation.

  I opened the book to the dog-eared page and began to read.

  Several hours later I closed the book. It seemed that Stephanie’s first love had left her at a Monte Carlo altar in order to smuggle drugs on his yacht. Once on campus, she had nearly been erased by a chicken truck, along with that charmer Martin Carlow, who was. Immediately after the teary memorial service at the campus chapel, Blane Britton had whispered the threat concerning Stephanie’s sister. Stephanie failed freshman composition, but her honor remained intact—for the moment.